Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World at NPG – it's all in the details

I finally found time to see the excellent Cecil Beaton show at The National Portrait Gallery. Ooh it's lovely. 

We often think of him merely for his 1950's voluminous satin concoctions, as shown above, and his award-winning designs for My Fair Lady (1964), but there was much more to the man than that, as shown in these next examples in which he used picture frames, cracked mirrors, clever lighting and strong shadows, even a mattress, to marvellous and moody effect:

Here are a couple of pics of the man himself, in his youth with his fellow Bright Young Things, dressed up as a couple of trend-setting 1920's ladies, and captured in oil paint:

Cecil Beaton is created some extraordinary portraits of film stars and celebrities. The NPG has chosen to feature his image of Elizabeth Taylor, a lady he was not too fond of, for much of their merchandising (not shown here) but, to my mind it's the way he captured Gary Cooper, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and John Wayne that better shows off his talents:

There are also lots of photos of Audrey Hepburn at the show. One image in particular fascinated me because, due to the excess of makeup she is wearing, it doesn't actually look like her. Her coquettish charm masked in thick make-up:

It occurred to me that her look in this image is very now, very 2020s. She is seen with overdrawn enhanced lips and eyebrows, false eyelashes and lots of foundation. I've paired it with a different kind of retouching – a self portrait of Beaton in his mid-20s where he has altered the surface of the negative/print by adding daubs to denote snow for a Christmas card. 

Quite a few pre-press photos shown here are retouched. For instance, I know people were much slimmer back then, but I very much doubt that the lady against the cracked mirror in the pic above, really had a stomach quite so flat and hips that narrow. I'd had spotted some retouching in one of the first rooms so I went back to take a closer look.

These images of society ladies dressed up for balls and parties at some of London's most fashionable venues are fabulous, made all the more interesting by the retouching on them, designed to enhance the highlights of their jewel encrusted accessories and shiny fabrics, and also to slim their figures. The pic above left shows where the girl has gone from a size 14 to a size 8 by the application of opaque white paint on her midriff, both front and back. The splattering of paint behind her is bizarre. Another lady with stars on her head has what can only be described as stippled hair extensions.

The next two images are sections from a photo of a very Jazz Age lady bedecked in pearls, beads and rhinestones:

The green flashes are reflection from the lights in the room on the protective glass, but the white paint, probably gouache, is evident, added to almost every globule and crease on her long satin gloves to better enhance the lustre on the jewels and the sheen on the cloth. 

I love this. It takes me back to my first years working in the design and advertising industry, before the age of desktop publishing, AppleMacs and Photoshop, when we used Cowgum, Rotring pens, PMT cameras and Letraset to create artworks for print. It was at the tail end of an era when every company had at least one person whose job it was to retouch photos with pen and ink, brushes and paint, as shown on these images.

On returning to the first section of the exhibition, where a collection of gorgeous portraits of society ladies is arranged on a midnight blue wall enhanced by beautifully-made paper flower arrangements that perfectly enhance and echo the images, I couldn't believe how I hadn't spotted the clunky retouching on these prints on first seeing them. 

But then, that's how retouching should be; you ought not notice it, even when it's as obvious as this next lady's unusually sleek features and Lillie Langtree's crisp profile:

The next two pics show that Mrs MacAdoo has lost her left shoulder and a sliver off the side of her face, and Miss Gellibrand has a nasty gash along her jawline:

I love that these are the the original retouched images. Yet it's odd that these adjustments are not mentioned in the panels that accompany any of the images. I'd like to know how much Cecil Beaton was involved. Perhaps these are his own daubs?

On the subject of the man himself making a mark on his own images, I'd first noticed a lovely signature under an image which looks to be created with one of those multi-coloured pencils:

Yet, in the same room, I spotted two different signatures, both in pink:

He signed his name in a variety of styles, with no identifiable mark. This surely must make identification and valuation of his work quite difficult.

If you haven't seen the show yet, do make an effort, because there's much more to see and find out in this multi-layered show than I have shown here – but there's less that a month left to see it – ends 11th January 2026.